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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247031">The Memories We Share</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/smcdonnell90/pseuds/smcdonnell90'>smcdonnell90</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Bonding, Dom Spock (Star Trek), F/M, Falling In Love, First Fight, First Kiss, First Time, First Time Blow Jobs, First pon farr, Jealous Spock, Knotting, Mind Meld, Work In Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 02:31:49</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>14,984</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26247031</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/smcdonnell90/pseuds/smcdonnell90</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>He is wholly unable to explain how he had lived this life without her constant presence, or why he had waited so long to ask her for it, or to envision his existence if he had not. Yet, forever and always, touching and touched, he finds...<br/>He does not wish to.<br/>A series of one shots, all in Spock's perspective, no particular order. Many more updates coming!</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Spock/Nyota Uhura</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>111</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Favored</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They had been seeing each other in a more romantic capacity from the moment she had received a hard earned promotion to Lieutenant, which was a genuine rarity among third year cadets, and if pride were logical, he would feel it for her greatly.</p>
<p>Though she was now considered to be a fellow officer to her peers and his alike, blurring the lines of technicality between the already slightly ambiguous regulations regarding personal relationships, they had decided it would be best to progress beyond a professional setting discreetly and slowly, and he had been grateful for the opportunity to become more familiar with such a Human custom as <i>dating</i>.</p>
<p>The evening he had turned 16, he had been taken for a weekend visit to Earth, and he had been forced by his mother to go along with his rather wayward male cousin to a loud, and blatantly illegal house party. It was traditional for teenage boys, she had said, but having been forbidden to discuss the matter with his father, he was not so sure. </p>
<p>There, a spinning bottle had somehow seen him pushed into kissing on the mouth a girl named Caitlyn that had developed a ‘crush’ on him when they were much smaller, and she had found him as awkward as she believed him to be handsome. As unresponsive as she believed him to be inexperienced. As alien as she believed him to be unable to understand the apparent significance of the uncomfortable event, and he had had no desire to repeat it then, or at any point in the future.</p>
<p>His first kiss with Nyota, however, taken at the staircase leading up to her dorm building where he had walked her after their third date, had sent static electricity through his cheek and along his scalp, spreading outward from where her palm was pressed to hold him at the back of his neck. </p>
<p>It had been vastly favorable to his previous experience, hot dancing desire pooling low in his stomach with the timid slide of her tongue, and his natural body heat should have been the only thing keeping her from shivering in the near freezing temperature of Terran winter, but still she was, pressed against him on the tips of her toes.</p>
<p>He was more than mildly disappointed when finally she pulled away from him, holding fast to his fingers instead, and the white vapor of her breath against his lips was most appealing, as she said, “Goodnight, Spock.”</p>
<p>His alarmingly rapid heartbeat had him taking a half step back from her, though she did not drop his hand, and the feeling she was veritably pouring into him gleamed in her expression.</p>
<p>“Goodnight, Nyota.”</p>
<p>His respiration was markedly elevated as he stared at her for longer than was necessary, and he did not make his way toward his apartment for some time, kissing her and kissing her as minutes ticked by.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Fire</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>In his first sexual experience with her, it had not been difficult to find what areas had been immensely pleasurable for her, and what was less so, as her need was suffocating where it bled into the pads of his fingers slicking between her bare legs spread out over his dimly lit bed.</p>
<p>He had had to focus his every remaining ounce of logic to the force of his hand against the curve of her waist, certain that if he were to slip too far beyond it he could break bone, and he fought until he could not against the competing desire to bruise her, mark her in such a suggestive place, and his ka'atra's promise never to bring harm to her.</p>
<p>She had attempted to reassure him, breathless and unconvincing that she would be ‘fine,’ but the obvious fact that she had not had anyone of his size was a prickling worry that what was meant to be an equally satisfying occurrence would likely be rather uncomfortable for her.</p>
<p>When her fingers began to stroke over his length where it was pressed to her stomach, the pressure of them excruciatingly inadequate, he was drawn wrought with excess, and could not take it any longer. The seething, Human lust with which she had been suffusing his first language in a very female appreciation, made his eyes roll back, his mouth dropping open to reveal a shake to his breath he could not help. He batted her head to the side with his own where he lay atop her, the sharp gasp she gave overly loud in the hush of his rooms while the basic principle of gravity slid and dropped him to where next he would go.</p>
<p>“Nyota,” he whispered into the skin behind her ear, and her grip in his hair tightened. "Tell me when to stop, and I will."</p>
<p>She turned her face to press her lips to his cheek, a loose nod the only real reply he was given, but he had waited for the moment he could feel her trust that he had told her the truth before working his hand underneath her hip. </p>
<p>He was resisted almost immediately as he bore slowly into her, but the trembling little noise she let out made his face fall slack where it was buried in her hair, his lungs emptying with every inch he pushed forward. He felt her focus weaken, her line of sight clouded, and the dull twist of her pain stopped him in her stead just before he could reach the sensitive nerve endings he could feel faintly tingling for him in the place where he knew in most women they would be. </p>
<p>He held himself still, skating his fingers up the soft length of her arm to pull her palm from his head, but as their hands aligned, her discomfort became sharply more clear to him. The burn of his body stretching her to her very limit was a throbbing press of hot velvet that had the muscles in his back tense, straining with the urge to drive deeper into her.</p>
<p>Her breathing was tumultuous, her chin tilted high up toward the ceiling, and he showered damp kisses down the line of her neck in an attempt to calm her. It had worked, her knees falling slightly outward from where they were crushing his ribcage, until his own efforts grew messy and clumsy, liquid heat swirling between them when the rolling of her hips seated him fully within her and he would never know a feeling more gruesomely unraveling than the fluttering micro-adjustments her body made to take him.</p>
<p>Along the back of his thighs, he felt her toes curl, and he pursed his lips together to stop the ridiculous quiver in them at the shudder that shot down his spine, the feeling of simply being so beheld by something so perfectly flawless drawing him senseless to near stupidity. </p>
<p>He ran his hand across her back while it was arched off the bed to keep her there, to revel in the alien location of her heart pounding its way out of her breast against his bare skin. He set his brow to her temple, listening for any unlikely change in her want for this as he pulled out of her enough that the blunt head of him nearly lost its place before sliding back into her, gentle and unhurried and now far less combatted by her wavering accommodation of him.</p>
<p>His thoughts swam, his lashes dragged against her cheek as his head bowed forward to the pitiful mewling caught and released from her throat as he set an achingly laggard pace until the sting in his scalp from her ripping at his hair had eased a bit. He kissed her deeply, eager and impatient for anything he could give her, anything she wanted, but he could do nothing but gasp her in, to infuse her every memory into his own, so that not an atom could pass in the space he left between them while he ground his way straight through her up the middle of her belly.</p>
<p>Her nails were biting into his skin, and just the vague notion in her thoughts of the fading scratches he would see there tomorrow had his breath shivering, his hands shaking with quiet nervousness when his mouth began instinctually to water with a taste strangely bitter.</p>
<p>“Nyota—” he started, but the odd sound of his voice so harsh and rough shut him off at the feeling of her fingers dancing along the fragile point of his ear.</p>
<p>He tried.</p>
<p>He tried to warn her, should have previously, given how much of his people’s sexual behavior was hidden in secrecy, but the words did not make sense, nothing else but this truly did, and he panted as he ran his tongue across the curve of her shoulder to numb it with his saliva to the sharpness of his teeth that would come.</p>
<p>The movement of his hips sped significantly after having merely scraped his incisors against her. The coursing pleasure that seared from them both at the action had him ceasing to breath completely to avoid her fear at the purely Vulcan noise beginning to bloom deep within his chest, aggressive and forbidding in a way he did not wish to be with her, and yet still, he gripped her jaw in his hand to pull her neck taught as he clicked a single canine into her shoulder with just enough pressure to pierce her skin. </p>
<p>And it was easy.</p>
<p>Far too easy, he thought, marveling at her frozen in deference beneath him, iron red blood slowly pooling from the cut, and he gave her another, and another, and another and he groaned as he lapped at them to quell the nauseating, anaesthetizing chemical in his mouth until he was pounding into her.</p>
<p>Her mind was as white as his, blank and senseless to anything not of the other, but the slamming, wet sound of them was obscene so as to shove him close to the edge a half step ahead of her, and he tangled their fingers tightly together to press such boiling duress back at her in a way that would force her along with him whether she was ready, or not.</p>
<p>Her regularly musical voice would likely be lost when they were through, the ring in it already rasping, and any constraint he could have grasped for vanished as she ordered him, stuttering and breathless. “<i>Sahris</i>.”</p>
<p>Faster. </p>
<p>He lifted her off the bed and into his lap at an angle that would set him inside of her no further, and as her head fell back, he could sense through her every pore the desperate, shameless longing to be so handled by him with a strength not human, but he did not feel as though he were the result of some fetish or a thing to strike off a list as he beat into her with a speed that could not be kept up by a man of her people, but rather that everything he deemed of himself too foreign for her was everything to her because it was his. </p>
<p>The clamoring, threatening, angry growling he had held from her scratched its way up his throat, as he clamped onto her own in his teeth with his jaw set wide while the only word he could hear her screaming in his thoughts was Vulcan, Vulcan, Vulcan, and he could feel that no one had ever given this to her, had taken her to a cliff side and kicked her, and no one ever would for as long as she would demand it of him.</p>
<p>Her arms came around his neck, clutching him, state of the art sound proofing suddenly inadequate, and when he raised his hand to the point along the base of her skull that should have melded them only at the surface, he was swept from himself and plummeting down into the blazingly bright place where her snapping synapses were firing one by one until all at once, an agonizing pressure building and gathering inward before exploding outward in a force that blurred his vision.</p>
<p>He pulled his mouth from her throat quickly before he could tear it right out from her, but for the first time in his life, he swore at the already almost painful tightness convulsing over him, and while he swelled and pulsed within her, he held her close in the constraint of his arm braced low around her hips, pushing her impossibly farther down onto him until he was spent to nothingness and wiped clean.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Fight</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Their first real argument had been entirely his fault, and although he knew this even then, he did not feel it until it was too late.</p>
<p>They had been sat at their respective desks in their shared office, working in what he had found that day to be unnerving silence, as he literally bit into his tongue to keep from shouting at her what it was that clouded his mind. He was well under the impression that she would know something was wrong the moment he opened his mouth, but the green, simmering annoyance he felt, had felt all afternoon, was not as commonplace as their current positions, and he had shut his computer terminal off to address her before he had taken the time to think on what was likely his better judgment.</p>
<p>“I overheard a curious conversation you had this morning.”</p>
<p>“Did you?” she quipped, flippant and almost prissy, and the soft smile she wore, her attention still held on the PADD in her hands had his irritation flaring.</p>
<p>“Yes, and I believe I just said that I did.”</p>
<p>Her eyes flicked up to him, the concern at his unusually harsh tone evident in her expression. “Okay, sorry. Which conversation then?”</p>
<p>He had had to work to keep the glare out of his bearing. “I find myself surprised that you are unaware. You were standing in the quad setting up a date with Doctor Leonard McCoy.”</p>
<p>“Wha—” She searched him, shaking her head while her confusion sharpened until understanding seemed to dawn on her face, and he wanted it gone. She did not understand. “A study date, Spock. Like for coffee. We’re not—”</p>
<p>“In what capacity would you say you know this cadet?” </p>
<p>He had let his volume rise a bit, as he stared unmoved at her eyes narrowing, and whether the indignation he saw flashing in them was due to his interruption or his obvious implication, he would not abide by it.</p>
<p>She had allowed this human male to grab her arm as they spoke on the walkway. Had laughed brightly with him. Smiled widely at him. Just the memory angered him, and he did not attempt to conceal this fact from his features any longer. </p>
<p>She started again slowly, as though he were a child who was not yet fluent in Standard. “Friends. Friendly. He’s my friend.”</p>
<p>“And how frequently do you set up such… meetings with this man?”</p>
<p>“What are you talking about?”</p>
<p>His brows tightened, his frustration constricting in his chest. “I am not in the habit of repeating myself.”</p>
<p>“And I don’t think I like what you’re insinuating, Commander. We’re not—”</p>
<p>“I asked you how often you see him.”</p>
<p>She dropped her PADD on the desk with a clatter. “Damn near every weekend, Spock! At a coffee shop. Around the corner. To study because he’s really good at shutting up for two hours, and it’s actually none of your business.”</p>
<p>“You are seeing another man every weekend, and you thought it appropriate to hide this fact from me because he is only your <i>friend</i>?” </p>
<p>“I'm not hiding anything from you!”</p>
<p>“Then why did you not tell me you were making plans with him?”</p>
<p>“Because last I checked, I didn’t need your permission to do whatever I want with my friends in my free time, and it sounds to me like all you are is jealous over absolutely nothing.” </p>
<p>She stood from her chair, stuffing her PADDs and comm unit into her bag as if she were leaving, and he crossed the room to block her way in cold, practiced, calm. He was seething, furious.</p>
<p>“You are not yet dismissed, Cadet.”</p>
<p>She huffed, condescending in her anger with him, and rolled her eyes hard enough that she may very well have seen the base of her own spine if such a thing were a possibility. “Are you actually going to let me go back to work then?”</p>
<p>“Are you willing to tell me the truth?”</p>
<p>“The truth about what?” Her voice was ringing off the walls of the tiled room, yelling at him fully with her face twisted in her temper, and if he were to say that such fiery beauty did not still affect him, he would be a liar. “When McCoy and I get coffee, to study, it’s because when he sits down, he says ‘hello’ and then he doesn’t say <i>shit</i> else until he stands up and says ‘goodbye’ because that’s what a study date is, and you’re acting like he and I are basically married now.”</p>
<p>“Did you hear me say those words?” </p>
<p>He loathed this form of pointless exaggeration, and he took another step into her in order to give her no choice but to look up at him.</p>
<p>“I don’t know! haven’t heard you say anything other than to accuse me of something I'm not doing!” She glared at him hotly, imploring him to simply drop it from where he towered over her until a streak of something he did not recognize blew across her features, her eyes dragging down over the collar of his instructors jacket to carve a hole into his throat, as she ran her tongue across her teeth. “What exactly is it that you think I'm doing with McCoy?”</p>
<p>“At this moment, I think you are overstating to me the innocent nature of your association with him,” he snapped at her, unconcerned with however she wanted to take his meaning. </p>
<p>Though at what seemed to be a confirmation of what she had thought he would say, she squeezed her eyes shut a moment before scrubbing her hand over them, and aside from puffing out a hard sigh, she did not continue. </p>
<p>She stared in his general direction for quite a while, her tight expression falling more and more until she simply nodded at the floor, and he had the distinct feeling that she would not look at him again. </p>
<p>“Innocent?”</p>
<p>She pursed her lips for moment, scraping her teeth over the bottom of them, and though her anger was still patently clear, he was close enough to her that he could pick up with his every breath the minor way her shift in emotional state had changed the scent of her skin. </p>
<p>His communicator chimed once from the corner of his desk, blaringly loud in the quiet that fell over them, and he turned his head to look at it, as though he could see from this distance through the closed casing to the words of the message he had so untimely received. The ridiculously idiotic notion of such a thought had his focus snapping back to her, but the weight of whatever impulsive and sudden mood had come over him that day dissipated forcefully and immediately to shamefulness throughout his chest when he found her skin splotchy and red from water glossing in her eyes.</p>
<p>What was the matter with him?</p>
<p>He reached his fingers out to her, barely brushing along the fabric of her sweater before she leaned down to shoulder her bag, and step past him. He stopped her in his grasp at the tops of her arms, feather light, but her enragement at his touch was tangibly broadcast through the air around him like a steam curling and rolling off of her, and he moved back, swallowing against the thickly settling guilt he felt for having so hurt her. </p>
<p>He let her get halfway to the door before he went to her.</p>
<p>“Where are you going?” he said, hardly more than a whisper, but he nearly winced in anticipation of her response.</p>
<p>When she turned to him, her demeanor was meek, and his head hung.</p>
<p>“I'm going home, Spock. My roommate is the one fucking Leonard McCoy every week. <i>Not</i> me. He’s nice, and he’s my friend, and he doesn’t treat me like all I am is a little, Terran <i>slut</i> who will go home with anyone who agrees to read with me at a coffee shop on a Saturday.”</p>
<p>He blinked at the word, effectively dousing him in ice water like no other she had ever said. He would never call her that. “I did not—That… that is not what I—”</p>
<p>“Not what you intended to imply? Yeah. Right.”</p>
<p>She turned again to the door, but he caught her slender wrist gingerly in his fingers before she could reach the palm scanner, and when she spun on her boots to rip it away from him, so definitively unwilling to accept the black possessiveness he could apparently hold if untethered, the venom in her voice was hissing, palpable.</p>
<p>“I don’t <i>belong</i> to anyone.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Forever</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Since their formal bonding ceremony, he has seen her in a different color in his mind when they are melded. </p>
<p>Before, it had been muted, yet striking still in it’s warmth and beauty, and he had been quite unbecomingly dejected that his ability to see it had been limited only to touch.</p>
<p>Now, parted yet never apart, it is blindingly iridescent. Not one solid color, but a shimmering blend of many that he has never seen with any other he has melded with, or viewed in the vague distance of a mind projected. </p>
<p>She is his bondmate. His most trusted. His survival. His conscience. His very soul, and he would neither need, nor see any other, forever and for life.</p>
<p>He is wholly unable to explain how he had lived this life without her constant presence, or why he had waited so long to ask her for it, or to envision his existence if he had not.</p>
<p>Yet, forever and always, touching and touched, he finds…</p>
<p>He does not wish to.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Fun</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>In the dark, it seemed, they were strikingly opposite to their defining nature in the day. Her domineering passion and hot temper for what was right in uniform an almost insanely arousing contradiction to her submissiveness as his own calm pacifism rapidly became violent and bruisingly tight. </p>
<p>Yet, in rare exception, she greatly enjoyed testing the limits of his control, and although perfection was not possible or logical, in those moments he is certain that she is as close as any one creature could get.</p>
<p>When she had come unannounced to his faculty quarters on an evening in late January, in her hands she had held two thin, silk ribbons she used to tie his wrists loosely to the arms of a chair he kept near a bookshelf in the corner of his bedroom. Though they were knotted only in delicate bows, and would not hold him if he were an impatient man, her intention was clear, as she settled on her knees between his legs where she stayed for quite a while.</p>
<p>He had succeeded in remaining relatively still, but by the third time she had brought him to that place that had his breath catching and stuttering only to deny him and stop, he was writhing beneath her hands at the scorching pressure she was slowly building in his lok with nothing more than light, wet kisses down the length of it, and the wood of his chair creaked with his effort to submit to her.</p>
<p>She had had to spread her palm open on his hip, pressing him back down onto the seat, as he struggled to keep from gagging her. He could feel the tickle of how thrilling she thought it, to have someone of such strength and command bending to her, waiting for her, and though her movements were decisive and sure, her body shook with the promise of what he could do if at any point he wished to simply slip his hands out from where they were so insecurely fastened.</p>
<p>The roof of her mouth was slightly ridged just behind her teeth in a senselessly pleasing contrast to the smooth expanse of it farther past, and with the black kohl she wore smudged under her eyes from reflexive watering after having swallowed him as deeply as he would comfortably fit, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He had not forgotten the appeal of sexual activity in her recent absence, so busy with Academy regiment that he had not been at liberty to see her in over a week, but with her in such a state before him, he found he had nothing in his life to compare to the feeling of having her lips wrapped around him in this way, the sight of her pink tongue undoing in its exoticism. </p>
<p>He watched himself disappear down her throat, over and over, and he knew her jaw must have ached, her knees sore on his carpet, but at his true and genuine begging, she did not stop again, and when finally she gave him what he did not believe it was possible for him to want so desperately outside of his cycle, it was with a burst of confetti behind his eyes that had left his every nerve ending vibrating in hypersensitivity. </p>
<p>When she held out her tongue to show him the evidence of it and shot him a playful wink, he had experienced a brief moment of arrhythmia, but she swallowed it, tugging on the ribbons that bound him, as she said, “Happy birthday, Spock.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Fitful</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Nyota was gone on a month long training mission to the U.S.S Myrmidon where she had been for the last 10 days, and given that it was an assignment she had taken over Summer break, he had run well out of fitting ways to be distracted from the roiling anxiety he felt at how quickly—no matter how unlikely—such excursions could turn dangerous and deadly. </p>
<p>His mother had seemed to notice over their weekly video call that he was not entirely himself, yet against his insistence, she had made use of her status as an Ambassador’s wife to commission a private shuttle to take her directly to San Francisco the very next day. </p>
<p>He had only recently confessed to her after weeks of unrelenting prodding that he was, in fact, seeing someone, and though he had not told her precisely who this woman was, he was certain that he spoke of Nyota Uhura enough that she had already come to an informed conclusion, and had been proven correct in this assumption at his mother’s inquiry into her well being the moment he had opened his door.</p>
<p>When she had stored away all of the rare teas and spices from his home she had brought for him, they settled into his couch, and she let him pour her a drink from a bottle of wine he only kept because it was her favorite, into a glass he only had because she kept it there, as he only half-heartedly listened to her inform him of all the events he had missed if only to have something else on his mind.</p>
<p>Apparently, his father had been increasingly preoccupied with his diplomatic obligations to the Federation, and although he knew his mother was saddened by this, he had no need to be kept abreast of anything in the Ambassador’s schedule. </p>
<p>Her enclosed rose garden had been almost completely ripped out with the strong winds of a major storm system having rolled through Shi'Kar, and although he knew she had worked hard to keep them alive in Vulcan climate, it was not the first time this had happened, and he had no doubt that they would soon be reared to bloom again. </p>
<p>The Gol harmonic symphony had toured the main cities, and although he was a bit disappointed to have missed such a unique opportunity to see them in person, he was sure he could find a recording of it without much difficulty. </p>
<p>T'Pring had been re-bonded to the very same man for whom she had left him nearly 4 years ago, and although he knew he would have been unbearably upset by this information in the past, it was nothing more than gossip to him now, and he simply did not care.</p>
<p>“— your father and I just could not believe the news when we heard because obviously everyone in the city is aware of it by now, and I am sure you know how much I always disliked her, Spock, but it was truly a dishonor to her family, regardless, for the way she—”</p>
<p>“I miss her,” he said, unable to let her go on any longer, as his psi-receptors flared with the ghost of Nyota's hands still tingling across his skin and raising the fine hairs along his arms and shoulders. </p>
<p>She must have mistaken his meaning, however, as her eyes went wide, her voice slightly squeaking. “T'Pring?”</p>
<p>He did not award her question with a response more than to stare at her in mild amusement, but when he shook his head, her expression morphed into one of a loving sympathy for him he had seen more times than he wished to count. </p>
<p>Perhaps it was the bar of chocolate they had been passing between each other, but he had not been intending to tell his mother any of this, and was still not sure why he did. She normally met such outbursts with silence in the event that he had anything else to add, but he was uncertain what more he could say, and was beginning to think that he should not have told her at all when she grabbed his bare foot where it was lying across the couch and pulled on it in a way only she ever would. He was finding it uneasy to look at her, which is likely what she wanted him to do, and so instead he set his first two fingers on the back of her hand to let her simply feel what it was he could not express.</p>
<p>His apartment was far too clean without his slim, African woman's clothing dropped on his bedroom floor, coffee cups sitting dirty in his kitchen sink, hair ties thrown on the dining room table, an extra toothbrush set directly on the bathroom counter when there were designated places for all of those items, and no matter how much this kind of untidy disorder had bothered him, he fitfully wished for it back. </p>
<p>He was not permitted to contact Lieutenant Uhura for a great majority of this time, as her early officership necessitated that her field training resemble as closely as possible what daily life aboard her commissioned starship would truly mean. He had never gone so long without communicating with her in some form or another since the very first day he had met her in his lecture hall, and while the weight of her absence was heavy, it left him empty.</p>
<p>His meditation had been unhelpful and his sleep disrupted. He had not eaten up to his usual caloric standard, and had lost close to a pound, as he destroyed his body in the Academy gyms. Even Captain Pike had commented on his glacial attitude toward their mutual friends, but his concern was not unfounded, and he wondered at how he had remained productive at all.</p>
<p>He was exhausted. Worried. Wildly unfocused. He was disquieted. Despondent. Brooding and unhappy, and it had been many years since he was so reminded of the strength with which he could feel these things. At one time, he had gone so far as to compare himself to Sybok, a slave to the burden of savage emotion, his logic eroded by a life time of conspiracy, but this was different. He knew it.</p>
<p>His brother’s banishment was a sensitive subject among his family, so he took his hand away, and waited for his mother to untangle the web of such odd introspectivity he had weaved for himself, as he leaned the side of his head against the couch where he was facing her in a hopeful attempt to counteract the very slight spin of the room. </p>
<p>“You love her, Spock,” she said, her voice an illogical comfort without the tinge of subspace distance between them, and the words themselves a terror.</p>
<p>But she was right.</p>
<p>It was not merely affection. He was not affectionate. It certainly was not merely her beauty. She was highly intelligent, and he was not so shallow. From the first time he had seen the floating image in her recruitment file, to the first of many times he had been profoundly impressed by her talent, to their first work day alone together as instructor and assistant, to the first time he had held her against him, in mind and body, to now. He had been compulsively, solidly, engulfed by her. He knew it.</p>
<p>His mother was still smiling sweetly at him, blatantly daring him to deny this fact, yet, as she had never been wrong in these matters before, and was quite obviously perfectly aware of it, of course he could not. His brow inched upward at her smugness, but he nodded until he stopped until he started again, feeling strangely boyish at the confirmation and acknowledgement of the fluttering jumping in the pit of his stomach that had been a part of his everyday life for as long as she had. ‘Butterflies' he believed was the colloquial term for this, and although he did feel mildly unconventional for having formed such a human attachment, he did not dismiss it. </p>
<p>“Yes. I do,” he said, the corners of his lips twitching in a way she would not have missed.</p>
<p>Her eyes were sparkling in her happiness for him, and he could tell that his own were a mirror of it, a carbon copy as a result of simple genetics, or so he told himself. “Well now, I only wish I had brought more with me! I have so many pictures she absolutely <i>has</i> to see.”</p>
<p>“She will be off planet for another 19 days, Mother.”</p>
<p>“As you have said, but I could have left a few of them here for her, my handsome, little honeybee.”</p>
<p>His face fell only slightly, and he sat up a bit straighter, his metabolism already beginning to clear the dizzying effects of such high amounts of common table sugar from his system. “Mother, please. Please do not call me that, if ever you are to meet her.”</p>
<p>Her brows raised, but her smile did not falter, as unfazed as ever he had expected her to be. </p>
<p>“Oh, I think I’ll call you whatever I want, son.” Her tone was as playful as it was firm, and although—or perhaps because—he was 28 years old, he knew better than to continue in his disparagement of the endearment, but she spared him without further addressing it. “Now,” she said, pulling the blanket off the back of his couch to wrap it around her shoulders in a formidable display of just how long she had intended to pepper him with questions. “Tell me more about her.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Force</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>In his culture, movement restrictive bondage was typically used only on males during their first and generally most violent pon farr, but this did not necessarily exclude female enjoyment of being bound themselves, and Nyota was apparently no exception to this.</p>
<p>He had caught a flashing vision in her thoughts during their most recent sexual encounter, and he recognized what it was he had seen. He tugged her wrists harshly to hold them in his hand above her head, and an unmistakable image of thick, black, leather blinked across the mirror of her mind. </p>
<p>Though he had not made use of this information at that time, there had never been anything he could have brought himself to deny her, and he most certainly had no intention—as once her professor of xenosociological experiences—to leave her wondering upon any subject, within or without the borders of his classrooms.</p>
<p>It had pleased her so greatly, in fact, he would not have believed that the sounds he was able to wrest from deep within her were solely human if she were not so, and the dark set of her eyes when she had entered his quarters to find the belt of his instructors uniform wrapped solid around his fist had been enough that he nearly abandoned the idea entirely in preference of driving her up the wall of his bedroom.</p>
<p>However, fortunately for them both, he had always considered curiosity and patience to be his people’s greatest virtues.</p>
<p>He had left no part of the front of her body untouched by the slow press of his lips until she was positively squirming, pleading with him as he marked her bare skin in his teeth and in the strength of his grip along areas able to be hidden—and some beautifully not—while he bound her hands and ankles firmly in knots he could likely tie in his sleep before flipping her over onto her stomach to begin again on her other side.</p>
<p>The transparent projection of her confidence that he would not hurt her beyond pleasurable effect was increasingly encompassed by her aching frustration for any of the <i>more<i> he could have given her in the previous hour, or would in the next, but she ceased her wiggling attempts to test her confinement when he snapped his belt against the bed frame from where he stood and struck her across the swell of her bottom in a sting that blushed pink before the material could even drop from her.</i></i></p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>The hoarse tremor in the breath she let out amazed him, and her heating desire had crackled into his skin, as he swept the palm of his hand along the rising edge of the welt he left her with to be sure that he was not overly forceful.</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>Thankfully, in her noisy and keening opinion, he had not been, but he was only able to lash her another five times further on each side before the last had threatened to draw her blood, and as this was not an honor he was willing to give to an inanimate object, he pulled her onto her hands and knees to wet his fingers inside her body, brushing them along her, over and over, with a pressure that was just less than what she needed while she thrashed against the soft rope that held her still.</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>She was burning for him, begging for him, and she was gorgeous this way, so very worthy of adoration in all its forms, but for quite some time, he drove her mad with the teasing touch of his hand dragging up and back down again, and each time he heard the pitch of her voice heighten, the core of her fluttering on the tips of his fingers, he dropped them to tighten the ties until they were digging into her skin.</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>The indistinguishable blend of pain and pleasure seemed to be all she had ever wanted of him in their private interactions, and she babbled at him in languages even he did not know while he gave her what it was she wished, and with a willingness unsurprising, yet as always, when Vulcan was on her tongue in these circumstances, it made him weak.</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>She used a term of endearment she had, before that night, never called him that quite simply translated to ‘cherished-one’, but given that she knew it was one only ever spoken between bonded couples, and had also likely known that it would bring such torturous slowness to a swift end, his fingers had faltered, his breath catching in his lungs and he shoved her back toward the edge of the bed while he freed himself to slip into her, fisting his hand in her hair to hold her rigidly to him.</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>It had been fortuitous that he had brought her so close by that point, for when she repeated the word another several times, he had had to stop her, his legs already shaking in tautness that stretched through his full body, but she screamed at him in protest of it, throwing herself back at him as best she could with such limited range of motion, and he had given into her before the thought had even wholly formed.</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>He had not been able to keep his crashing pace for long, but had not needed to, and when the thread they were hanging from had splintered and broken, for her it was harder than it ever had, and she would later swear to him that she had seen the stars that were her namesake behind her eyes in an illogical hyperbole he still quite understood. </i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>When eventually they had settled underneath his blanket, her leg tossed over him in her most favored position, she had giggled at his inquiry into whether or not she had anything else in mind.</i>
  </i>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Fabricated</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>A single candle was the only light he kept in his meditation room, and the glow of it, flickering across the relaxation in her features, was a calming sight he appreciated very much.<br/>
</p><p>They did not speak in this room, bare and windowless as it was meant to be, allowing only for inner reflection in the purpose of purging anything harsh or negative, and with nothing but the sound of her breath, her eyes closed and legs crossed, it was an easy task.</p><p>Silhouetted in every corner, he stared at her in a way he knew she normally found rather odd. Darkness did not bar his attuned senses to the view of each dotted, little freckle she had ghosting along her nose and cheeks, and as they were usually covered in some way in a light layer of some cosmetic or another, it was rare that he saw them at all.</p>
<p>He committed them again to his memory, so that if ever, for some hypothetical reason, they were to disappear, he could draw them back on with a precision only a Vulcan could have in order to keep her as she was now, forever.</p>
<p>T'Pring would be a handmaid in comparison to her, and she was renowned for her beauty nearly planet wide. To him, however, she was frigid, quietly rather witless, prejudiced to all the things that the woman who sat across from him accepted of him, and he had never been so glad to be freed of the source of such distress in his life, no matter how guilty he had previously felt for assuming it was he who had not been enough.</p>
<p>Nyota had never made him to feel this way. Had never doubted that there was nothing he would not do for her, nor had she ever entertained the misconception that his blank exterior was all that he had to give, and he would repay her for bringing him such contentment until he could no longer.</p>
<p>She must have felt his gaze on her, and when her eyes opened to meet his own, her smile was the most alluring thing she could have given him, laced, as it were, in the aura of utter peacefulness.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. Fragile</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>After having lost their first two early on, in battering waves of disappointment, they had decided not to name their third until after they had seen him. </p>
<p>When finally they had, they named him Solor.</p>
<p>Literally meaning ‘gardener’ in modern Vulcan, and in the rarely spoken form of ancient Golic, meaning ‘desert flower.’ The title, when applied to a living being, carried the metaphoric connotation of resistance to intense heat, stress, or sadness dependent upon where the tonal emphasis would then have been placed within the word, and was more accurate in describing the reasoning for which they had chosen it. </p>
<p>He had hardly been shocked to find that his father had passively considered it rather emotional, but given that Spock as his own name was one traditionally shortened from a rendition of a term meaning ‘half of heart and soul,’ he was quite pleased with it, and did not consider the Ambassador’s opinion further than to merely have heard it.</p>
<p>As Vulcan features seemed to be genetically dominant in Terran mixed heritage, their son’s physiology was as alien to his mother of Earth as he was himself. The only strikingly bright and clear exception being his unique eye color, which were a perfect duplication of his wife’s right down to the diamond shaped, hazel flecks in his inner irises, but his bone structure was extraordinarily dense and heavy as all in his species, and it had made for a particularly volatile pregnancy.</p>
<p>Nyota’s maternity leave had been pushed up a full month early to complete bed rest when their baby’s foot had fractured one of her ribs on the bridge for the second time, as he stretched as far out as he could in the ever limited space he had within her. </p>
<p>The copper suppressors she was required to take to avoid blood poisoning had left her unbearably nauseous for so long that it had merely become a part of her daily life that had still frequently bothered her to the point of gasping tears that could not be calmed. </p>
<p>Her feet had swollen to such a degree that she could no longer wear her boots, or any of her shoes for that matter, and she was illogically embarrassed by how fat and red she thought they looked, as he pressed his thumbs into the soles of them in an attempt to increase her blood flow.</p>
<p>When Solor’s brain had fully developed, so had his bolstering telepathic ability, and his natural bond to her had kept her in a state of constant, deep sleepiness near the end that would not have been shaken by a torpedo impact.</p>
<p>Yet despite any of these difficulties, he had given her everything she could think to ask for, as was the charge of any bonded Vulcan male in ensuring his mate’s safety and comfort at all costs, and her immense excitement to meet the one that grew her belly was a stunning thing that he truly did not believe he could bring himself to trade for anything in the known or unknown world.</p>
<p>Her delivery was surprisingly quick and without major complication, and he had remained tightly melded to her throughout it, blocking any outward physical sensations he may have received to flow only his calm through his bond to them both while she squeezed his other hand with what would have been a painful strength, pushing and pushing until finally, she had dropped back onto the bed, panting, and after months of interminable waiting, they were met with the wailing shriek of their son's first breath from outside his mother’s body.</p>
<p>There was no amount of research, or practice, or anticipation that could have prepared him for the way he felt, they felt, and he had not been aware that he was holding his breath until he was lightly dizzy, his head spinning with under-oxygenation when a bundled boy, an impossibly small picture of himself was laid across her chest, but whatever it was that Dr. McCoy had said to him when he had done so sounded as if he were speaking from underwater, the hand he clapped on his back nearly non-existent with his vision completely centered on the astonishingly alert eyes of his only child.</p>
<p>He recognized their voices, but their touch was what had almost immediately calmed his splintering screaming into sleep, and the traumatic experience of birth from the broken perspective of a newly born infant was remarkably surreal, nearly out of body in such a way that he did not feel as though it were for him to know, but he filtered it back to view it again within Nyota’s distinctly feminine knowledge, and her amusement with him and fierce love for him were bright, and as familiar as anything.</p>
<p>With more than a bit of effort, he had gathered his focus, sweeping his middle finger across the upward slope of his baby’s delicate brow bone before setting it upon his temple, and with his other still splayed out along his wife’s cheek, he sent small shocks of psionic energy rippling through them to strengthen their bond to each other, careful to keep from overpowering in the jarring sensation of a permanently altering mind, yet given that it was not one Nyota herself had been unready for, her words sang clear and steady in his thoughts.</p>
<p>
  <i>/We did it, Spock/<i></i></i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>He had no need to clarify.</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>There were still several staff members in their room working to repair the tearing Solor’s shoulders had caused her, and so he hid his splitting smile in her arm, gently pulling an errantly loose, little foot away from him when he was squarely kicked in the face by it. </i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>The overwhelming elation he had sent through it had him stirring again, so he let it go to house it back within the blanket Nyota’s mother had made for them, but she wriggled her arm out from under him, pushing him up, and he covered his mouth with his hand until she moved that, too.</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>Her fingers sifted through his hair and down the side of his neck, tickling him only slightly in such an odd state of adrenaline and endorphin, but her expression was soft, shining, as she asked him, “Are you happy?”</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>He simply nodded at her, his thoughts drawing blank with what next he was meant to do, as after having seen each other through so many moments of great tragedy that had somehow still brought them to their proudest achievement from their hardest work…</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>There was no word.</i>
  </i>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. Foreign</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>A/N: I am absolutely loving all the reviews you guys are leaving me, and they’re super inspiring and motivating, so drop me a critique or a prompt or anything else as a little reward for my fun in sharing these with you. Thank you all so much!</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Contrary to popular belief, there were many subjects at which he did not excel. </p>
<p>He had been asked on several occasions by his colleagues and students what those things may be, and he would give the same answer in each instance to result in stilted laughter at the plain fact that the science of psychology was most certainly one of them. </p>
<p>However, more realistically while no less truthful, a conventionally pleasant singing voice was also a gift that he did not have. He was proficient in the mastery of many stringed instruments, and held a great appreciation for music, but the deep, almost gravel roughness of his cadence left the need for vocal accompaniment up to the whim of literally anyone else. His mother would tell him, specifically in order to draw amusement from him, that he could not carry a clear tune in the event that it would save his life from a pack of wild Earth bears if they were to give him such a grave ultimatum for it. It was one of the more illogical things she ever said.</p>
<p>Additionally, he was hardly an acclaimed chef. He did enjoy the exactitude that was required by most forms of French and Vulcan baking, and cooking simple dishes for himself when he would be considered in many places a bachelor was not difficult, but in the area of entertaining, or in the accommodation of dietary preferences far dissimilar to his own, he was woefully lost. Generally, he was able to avoid such an issue by his preference of supporting the large number of diverse establishments that lined the downtown metropolitan of San Francisco, and he was content to leave cooking to the expertise of a skilled professional. </p>
<p>Finally, and perhaps most unnecessarily while still no less unfortunate, he was soundly inept at deciphering the confounding nature of romantic involvement, or even merely acquainting himself with someone new. He was inescapably a diplomat’s son, and so could charm easily in many ways when it was culturally imperative, yet when it was not, he found himself quite troubled when faced with interactions purely social. This was not an inadequacy he had ever been raised to give much thought, but there was a female, a Human who had petitioned into his Advanced Phonology course to which those thoughts seemed to be drifting with increasing frequency. </p>
<p>She routinely sat in the front rows for his lectures where her classmates saliently avoided it, and while she had proven herself over the course of her first year to be fluent in more languages than he would have thought possible for one of her species, she was a woman of surprisingly few words in class discussion, though what she did say had enlightened him to expand the detail in his syllabus. She was undoubtedly attractive, astoundingly so, and her gaze was so direct, he had had to avert his own in an effort to avoid drawing back to it more often than was strictly professional.</p>
<p>When he had inquired after her recruitment file, he had been told by the head of his department, and now was quite certain for himself that she was peerlessly intelligent despite her rather young age, her ambition practically catapulting her to the top of her class with a quality of work that impressed him, and he had no doubt that she would be the most qualified candidate to fill the newly required position of his teaching aid in the next academic year.</p>
<p>It would be a post highly sought after as a fine addition to any well rounded resume, which is what led him to be quite sure that she would apply for it when it became available. Perhaps, if he were to be counseled that it were not too presumptuous, he would introduce himself more formally to her as an attempt to make her feel more comfortable with his mannerisms beforehand. </p>
<p>There could be no harm in that.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0011"><h2>11. Forget</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>When he dreamt—in the rare occasion that he did dream—it was almost always of the same general premise.</p>
<p>And she hated it with a smoldering avidity that trumped all other things.</p>
<p>He turned his face into their pillows to hold his breath, and though he did not entirely wish for her comfort in those moments, he would never ask her to remove her hands from him, as they drifted under his shirt and down his back, and would never tell her that there was nothing she could whisper to him in the silence of overnight hours that would ease the guilt of having seen so many slow and painful and burning deaths while he remained alive.</p>
<p>While it was likely the source of his upset that evening, he had yet to tell her of the missive he had received from one of the last people he would have ever expected to hear from again. He had not thought to wonder whether or not this person even still existed, and had left the message unread in his inbox for far longer than he otherwise would have, given that the subject line had told him quite blatantly what it was he would come to read within the body of it.</p>
<p>Stonn had died almost instantly in the Battle for Vulcan, his ka'atra irretrievable. He had been in the building that was leveled by the arm of the drill that had shot through the small city in which it had fallen.</p>
<p>T’Pring’s bond sickness for him was debilitating, and apparently she had been told that it could be eased by reforming her betrothal tether to himself, and she had inquired after his willingness to do this when it seemed that her sense of dignity and decorum had been lost along with her departed beloved. </p>
<p>He felt not even a tremor of longing for her, but though she had hurt him in many ways throughout his life, it did not necessarily follow that he could not empathize with the devastating and desolate emptiness that came with such an unforeseen loss of one once thought impossible to live without. He had forwarded the information to his father with the thought that he may be able to help her, but had second guessed his own logic in having done so the moment it had gone through, too late to call it back, and still too soon for him to have yet replied to it.</p>
<p>He was nearly certain that Sarek would attempt to convince him that T’Pring's appeal to him would be an agreeable one to accept. That they could pick up where they left off, rebuild and repopulate and reconfigure Vulcan society with her in a way that he did not think his father would ever believe a human woman could. The New Vulcan High Council had sent him a similar message two weeks prior that had left him angered at their sudden break in pure-blooded elitism that had never been anything other than a means to prove him inferior for his hybrid heritage. </p>
<p>He would never lie to Nyota, never, and he was not intentionally keeping this missive from her, but he genuinely wished he could simply ignore it as though it never happened, as though it had been lost in transmission, no matter that it still sat at the top of his roll, unable to bring himself to delete it like every other missive he was sent as soon as it was read.</p>
<p>She would not understand why he did not tell her sooner, but he would tell her soon. He would tell her all the vulgar and unkind things he wished to say to all those who had petitioned to have the Ambassador removed from his position for his half human son, if only to have someone left to say it to. </p>
<p>He would tell her, would actually use the words to tell her that he loved her, and would not omit how conflicted this made him feel for his sense of greater good to his people over his own happiness. </p>
<p>He would tell her how badly he wished to be more like his elder counterpart, seemingly a perfect balance of unwavering logic and integrated welcoming of human instinct that he himself had never learned to have, as he had never truly tried to be more open to the way his mother must have felt to be so put upon and dismissed by him for the entirety of his life.</p>
<p>She would not understand, but he would tell her the truth.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0012"><h2>12. Factual</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>On a free evening during a long awaited shore leave rotation, the bridge crew had put together a surprise party in the officers lounge aboard the ship to celebrate Pavel Chekov's 21st birthday.</p>
<p>His own objection to it had been quickly negated when he had been ordered by his Captain to attend such a frivolous function, but in a sort of compromise, he was only required to stay for as long as Lieutenant Uhura did. This did not mean much to him by way of taking an early leave, however, as she herself had been greatly thrilled at the opportunity to simply wear something other than her uniform on their first scheduled day off together in several weeks.</p>
<p>Though it had been loud and busy, were he to be as truthful as he ever was, he would be forced to admit that it was not as dreadful an occasion as he thought it might be, and he leaned his back against one of the bolted tables in the corner, dodging repeated questions from Jim and Chief Engineer Scott in regards to how he could ‘get a girl like her’ while he watched her sway in growing intoxication in the flowing, golden dress he had bought her specifically for this small event.</p>
<p>After more than half of a large bottle of some clear liquid, the scent of which burned in his lungs far back from where he remained observing them, Mr. Chekov had completely lost his ability to speak in Standard, much to the hilarity of his guests. Nyota was one of the only members of the whole of the <i>Enterprise<i> that also spoke Russian, and so she had spent the majority of her time listening and laughing at whatever experience he was recounting to her, steadily adding to her own piling number of empty glasses.</i></i></p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>His amusement with her was difficult to contain when she wobbled past the trio of them some time later with another full beer in her hand, yet when she had actually stated aloud that she was drunk, he reached out and plucked the bottle from her grasp, sculled it, and dropped in the recycling port before she could make any further attempt to ‘keep up’ with anyone else.</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>She had shouted at him for it, her eyes bright and beautiful with mock indignation even as she braced her palm on his chest to avoid tripping over a chair she had nearly caught her foot on, but his hands steadied her low at her waist in a rather open display of their upcoming marriage that he found he did not overly mind, given how many extra sets of eyes had been following her throughout the evening.</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>He replaced her bottle with his water glass, staring at her until she finished it to the bellowing chanting from Kirk and Scott for her to chug it, as if it would truly make a difference in her current state of inebriation, and when he took it back from her, she leaned into him, tilting her face up to his in a harrowing effort to equal his height. </i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>“You’re gonna have such a hard time with me tonight, Spock. I just know it,” she said, and the muscles in his abdomen tightened in a well practiced and effective suppression of laughter. </i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>“A statement which only seems to grow increasingly factual with each moment you have spent away from your station, Lieutenant.”</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>She smiled widely at him, rolling her eyes, and stepping on his toes, as she crowded him back against the table before he pushed her to hold her out at arms length. He had done so mostly for the benefit of his onlooking companions who were finding the interaction quite funny themselves, but she shook him off, and was promptly handed another beer from a quiet Andorian woman that he had seen working in the engineering bay earlier that afternoon.</i>
  </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <i>A hard time, to be sure.</i>
  </i>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0013"><h2>13. Faint</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He had awoke rather convulsively, late that evening, in a searing pain that seemed to be melting his flesh right off of his bones.</p>
<p>He was disoriented, his skin scorching, his limbs shaking in wracking shivers, and though it was not possible for fully blooded Vulcans to vomit, he was beginning to feel as though that may not be true for himself. </p>
<p>He did not have even a passing guess as to how long he had slept, but his senses were profoundly heightened to the point that every soft, whirring noise of the ship pierced his inner ear and flared the ache in his head. Every thread of his clothing scratched him, and the irritation he felt at his trembling fingers attempting to strip the fabric of his shirt away had him tearing it down the middle instead to drop it in a heap over the edge of their bed.</p>
<p><em>Their</em> bed.</p>
<p>His focus darted to the sight of his wife, sweating with the radiating heat of his body next to her, but sleeping nonetheless, and the feminine form of her, outlined in the thin material of their sheets had doubled the dangerously palpitating patter of his heartbeat like a lightening in his side. His pupils blew out, and he squeezed both sets of his eyelids shut against the reeling tunnel vision he was experiencing in the view of the perfectly opposite gossamer of her delicate, human figure.</p>
<p>He nearly tripped out of bed with a frighteningly uncharacteristic gracelessness to drop to his knees in his meditation room, the thought of setting fire to the candle on the floor in front of him pointless, as he labored to slow his respiration in the dark. The scent of her was everywhere, choking him, and he wrapped his arms around himself while he came to the realization that he had been desperately hoping to avoid since his most recent birthday.</p>
<p>He had been horribly distracted during the entirety of his shift the day before, and had very nearly been late to presenting himself for it, having slept well past Nyota’s own morning alarm until she had had to gently jostle him. Additionally, considering the routine, if not completely forgettable mundane of another eight hour day docked in a repair based space port, he was overwhelmingly tired by the time he had returned to their quarters, whereupon he had spent the better part of two hours pacing and agitated and overly warm, performing worthless tasks in order to busy himself from the extreme restlessness settling in his stomach.</p>
<p>He had known for days that something was not right.</p>
<p>Though he had been bonded for several years by this point, his marriage was still not recognized as ‘validated’ by the overseeing matriarchal member of his clan due to the fact that he had not passed into his first cycle with his partner in the most traditional sense. </p>
<p>He had previously discussed with Nyota the damage that he may cause when the day this would change came upon them, as well as the unrecognizable person that he may become to her, but she was not convinced of this, determined that he would always be the man she loved no matter how insistent he had been that she was wrong.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, they had prepared as best they could, heavily reinforcing their bed and door frames, and discreetly clearing their joint application for a short term medical leave to be activated at any time they needed it to be. They had also, through countless tests and trials, secured approval for several strong hyposprays that would help to numb them both to the strength of it, yet whether or not he would remember to use them in the fog of his fever, he did not know.</p>
<p>What he did know certainly, was that he did not feel the sensation of physical pain in the same way that most other humanoid species did. In the line of active duty, he had been stabbed, he had been shot, he had been burnt, and he had been able to carry out his mission parameters with little, to no delay.</p>
<p>Yet from where he sat, curled in upon himself in the relative safety of what he considered to be his home, there was no doubt that he had never hurt so much.</p>
<p>As it were, his resolve to remain seated was threatening to give out, bunched tight with what must have been hours of constant, quaking, shuddering overnight, and he could feel the zapping of his mind scattering into what would soon be a seizure if he were not already so close to her, his core self beginning to crack out from under him, as his gasping breaths turned shallow and quick.</p>
<p>The longer he waited to wake her, the harder he would be with her. Of this, he was sure.</p>
<p>His nerves were frying with his short distance from her, the rising throbbing in his pelvis working him to be unbearable, and in his itching need for an outlet of a great amount of unspent energy, he pounded his fist onto the floor before smashing it into the wall beside him with a force that dented the imprint of it through the steel paneling, but within moments of it, he could hear her rustling against what he could vaguely assume was their pillows, muffled as it seemed all sounds were becoming through the roaring of his pulse in his ears.</p>
<p>With no mind for meditation, and no will power left, it took some time for him to make his way back to their bedroom, the blazing soreness spreading across his body leaving him with the need to steady himself on the wall to catch his breath, but when he found the door already open, he had thought to see her still in bed, and grew quite panicked when he did not see her anywhere.</p>
<p>He searched wildly until he could feel her tugging at him just behind the door to their bathroom, unsteady on her feet in the fractured presence of his thoughts within her own, and though he wrestled with such an incongruous wish for her to be near him, and nowhere near him simultaneously, still he had crossed the room to shove his fingers into the edge of the doorframe, ripping it off of its sliding track to find her standing by the sink with a set of hyposprays in her right hand, her eyes wide with worry at the nearly vicious picture he made in the harsh, florescent lighting casting him sharp, sallow, and flushed a shade of green she would likely not see from him again.</p>
<p>“Spock?” she said, her concern enveloping all else she was capable of passing to him at his inability to immediately register the sound of his own name, as he stared at her comm unit on the edge of the counter. “Everything will be okay, <em>ashal</em>. Just tell me what you need.”</p>
<p>He did not yet know. It had taken him far too long as it was to process the sentiment in Standard, but if she had said anything else, he was no longer listening, jealousy beginning to simmer up to cleave through him at the number of men she could have been speaking to on her comm while she hid from him. She would soon know for herself what it was he truly needed.</p>
<p>He heard the rumbling in his chest as she came toward him, a noise that served no other evolutionary purpose than to intimidate, yet she did not stop in her stead until the volume of it echoed throughout the confined space and beyond, and he could feel her attempt to soothe him into silence through their bond, her slender hand reaching out to dip beneath his waistband and squeeze him in a way that had his breath rushing out of his lungs in something quite close to relief that did not last long enough.</p>
<p>To whom had she been speaking?</p>
<p>Regardless of how softly the other stroked him, the sight of those needles clutched in her palm, the faint smell of her blood from the pinprick on her neck was too much in combination with this question, and it angered him with such passion that it had shifted the color of her signature from where she was corded through the center of his brain, which was only further irritated as she pulled her hand off and stepped away from him. </p>
<p>For what did she feel she needed these?</p>
<p>Why would she not wish to feel his bite on her skin?</p>
<p>It was as natural a need to him as breathing. She <em>knew</em> this. Had <em>wanted</em> it. The heat of his tongue had been enough at any other point he had stung her with it. She was <em>his</em> mate. She was <em>his</em> heart. She was <em>his</em>, and he was hers, and she had known, from the very moment they began, that the strength in his jaw could protect her as easily as it could kill her. Had known that he could satisfy her every desire in a way no other man had ever tried, or could ever imagine. </p>
<p>He almost wished that he had had a challenger when they were formally bonded, so that he might show her with how little effort he could tear him in half. She had <em>chosen</em> a Vulcan male, and this was the Vulcan way. He would die before he mated with another, would die by the end of tomorrow without <em>her</em>, but if she could not take him, then there was no purpose in—</p>
<p>The strike of her arm jolted him into an action he had not given any thought, his hand shooting out to grip her by her jaw at the sting of the hyposprays on the juncture of his neck and shoulder, his muscles jumping at the sound of the casing hitting the floor, as it fell from her grasp. </p>
<p>She fought adamantly to turn her head, her hands shoving against his chest, but his wrenching growling slit through her stomach while he dragged her up into him until her feet no longer touched the ground, and she swallowed her whimpering to be still again, as he dug through her perspective for what it was that she had dared to stab him with. He could feel his heart pumping it through his veins in a blindingly painful expansion of them clearly visible in the artery below the skin of his wrist.</p>
<p>Had she poisoned him?</p>
<p>She yelped at the tightening of his hold on her, his teeth bared sharp and white and clenched in their need to stain them red with his claim of her, and his fingers drifted down her throat to cut away at her air supply when he could not find a clear answer behind her fear of him, but just as he thought he could throw her to the nearest flat surface he could find in his body’s clawing effort for survival, his vision dotted and adjusted to his pupils shrinking to more normal levels, his skin subtly cooling, and the trembling in his arms and legs beginning to slow along with his heart rate.</p>
<p>His <em>lok</em> strained against the fabric that constricted it, his need of her not even minutely diminished, but the countless scenarios in which he could have her seemed to grow from a mindless rutting along the shower wall to much more gentle suggestions with each possibility he counted off until he could think of nothing else, his glowing, sparking rage forgotten to be replaced by a panting desire he had never known.</p>
<p>He watched her mouth move over words he did not understand until repeated again, and then again. He was hurting her, the heat of his skin still almost too much for her to bear, and although the thought of his fingerprints branding into her cheek was endlessly appealing in its potential permanence, the sudden brim of bubbling lucidity made it possible to set her down, his guilt and confusion pulling to the surface at her skitter backwards.</p>
<p>He looked toward his feet at the now empty, plastic box dropped between them, his brows knitting together, as he took another step away from her. </p>
<p>The injection was three-pronged. He remembered it from their meeting with McCoy. He would not have needed them at all if his wife were solely Vulcan, but he was the one who had told the doctor what symptoms would be most difficult for him to naturally temper.</p>
<p>A fever reducer, a muscle relaxer, a specified hormone replacement.</p>
<p>A fever reducer, a muscle relaxer, a specified hormone replacement. </p>
<p>Yes, he remembered. </p>
<p>He had told her that he would not, that he may fight against her if she did not use them in a moment she considered most opportune, and though he was petrifyingly near to injuring her gravely for it, she had done the right thing, exactly what he had told her before that she must. </p>
<p>He raised his hand to her again very slowly, and slid it back across her face to twist his fingers into her hair at the base of her neck, pulling her back to him and pushing against the urge to lift her onto the counter and slip into her right then, as he set his brow to her own. His limbs were increasingly heavy, the shake in them not quite yet gone, but he held her there for as long as she let him, kissing her soundly through his nervousness for when he would lose reality again until her palm pressed to his sternum to walk him back to the edge of their bed.</p>
<p>She cuffed his hands to the frame of it, a metal material he could likely bend, but not break, and he shook his head at the apology building in her expression, as she clicked them as tight as they would allow. It was necessary, loosely traditional even, and given that they did not have the resources needed for his height and weight to create more than one set of the injections that had done well enough to settle him, they may only have a solid twelve hours of comparative calm in what could easily be a week long battle for procreation. It was the only alternative that could have afforded her the ability to bind him into non-violence, and he was sane enough to be grateful for it.</p>
<p>His need of her remained savagely overpowering, as he watched her shed the remainder of their clothing, and although he had previously instructed her to draw out their coupling for as long as possible in order to wear down his stamina for the sake of her own, his impatience to feel her clenched around him was immense, paralyzing, and he whined at her until she joined him atop their sheets. Her hands roamed over him, fingernails clawing like razor blades across his flaming skin to leave lime green trails in their wake that he begged her in her thoughts to be deeper, streaming broken words into her until he could feel his blood dripping from them.</p>
<p>At the first press of her lips to his inner thigh, his handcuffs clanged against the railing of the bedframe, and he writhed underneath her tongue as she traveled along his body, cooling and comforting, but slower than he could stand. His hips bucked mindlessly, his head tossing back and swimming while she tore at his flesh in the blunt grip of her teeth, rubbing her cheek and wetted fingers over the marks she left to scent him with her desire, and it swelled him in a knot at his base in a way that would not occur outside of his season, but would likely be nearly beyond her endurance when finally she would try to take it in. </p>
<p>He was finding it very difficult to keep his eyes open, bleary with want and a delirious ache between his hips, as he struggled to stay sat up against the headboard, but with no choice in the way he was bound, he kicked through the buzzing in his legs, no longer able to hear any of the unbridled noise flooding out of his own mouth. </p>
<p>His lungs were tightening with the smell of her arousal growing with every bead of sweat rolling down her body, and his breath wheezed in his chest with the ingrained compulsion to gratify it. Chuffing and snarling, he shoved her with the heels of his feet to straddle him, yet though she tried to stay safely away from his hands, he had pushed her too far, too hard, and he snatched her head by her hair at the side of her temple, tugging it back to expose her neck to him.</p>
<p>The taste of her skin was maddening, and from every place it touched his he could feel her oppressive suspense to be reminded of what it was like to be so pinned by him, but as he passed his tongue just above her collarbone and as far across her shoulder as he could reach, she shifted on his lap to slide her center over him, and his hands no longer obeyed the impulse sent to them from his motor cortex.</p>
<p>She stole her head back from him to align their bodies, pulling his index and middle fingers into her mouth, and he thought he might be sick from the pleasure of her stretching to sink down onto him until she could not widen upon it any further. </p>
<p>He felt drunk, drugged, dizzy with nature’s way of ensuring his species be brought back from the edge of extinction, and as she rose up and fell down on him, again and again, he had no strength left to reach for, no force of order to keep himself from using her as if she were a ragdoll to piston lifeless.</p>
<p>He would take and take until there was nothing left of her to give, nothing left of her husband to offer her in return for it, and he bent his knees, planted his feet, and battered her. Her hands ran over his face, his neck, too soothing and gentle for the aggression she would receive in these next days, but he centered on it as though she were the candlelight to which he stilled his thoughts every morning and every night.</p>
<p>His mind was empty, scraped out and glacial with singular instinct, yet as if she could see straight through it and into his deepest longing, she called out to keep his attention, keening in his ear that she would never leave him, that she would never wish for the touch of another, that she needed only him and the feeling of his body buried within her, forever and always, and he could not take it.</p>
<p>When the pressure in his pelvis grew to torture, he pleaded with her to free his hands. He was so close, so agonizingly there, but he could not let go, pounding and pounding her, and he wailed at her for what he wanted, pulling at the restraints hard enough to bend the railing behind him, as they bruised into his wrists.</p>
<p>His arms were faintly tingling, nausea threatening to overwhelm him, and he could feel her worry, her soreness, her towering need for this to end, and he wanted her release almost more than his own if only to call himself deeper into her. He was barking at her for it, a cut off, roaring, inhuman sound, and when her fingers pressed into the cuff on his left hand to let him loose, he took her hip, entirely unable to assess the power of his grasp, as he squirmed against the intensely foreign sensation of his knot moving upward and into her toward his center to trap them together, so as not a drop of what he would spill into her could escape from between her legs.</p>
<p>She shrieked at the fill of him, and he raised his hand to her face to block the pain of it, but pain was not what he found, and before he could set his third finger to her temple, she shattered over him, his eyes watering and rolling back at the force of her rapidly clamping around him, bleeding him dry, and when finally he sagged against the bedframe, gasping and exhausted, he had never been so tired, never expended so much effort, or energy, as though his very soul had been sucked out of his body to leave him boneless and hollow and convulsing in shock. </p>
<p>She leaned her head on his shoulder, her heart fluttering on his chest while they waited until he calmed enough to pull out of her, and he hissed at his renewed desire as she raised up on her knees to flop onto her side next to him. He willed himself to control his breathing while he was still able, attempting to pull himself into a light meditation, but his eyes snapped open at the feel of her hand on his other still bound to the rail.</p>
<p>It would be incredibly unwise for her to give him back his full range of movement, regardless of the medicinally induced suppression he was granted by the pharmacological expertise of Dr. McCoy, and he tried to tell her this, yet the words were swept from him the moment they flashed across his thoughts to the sight of her bare leg thrown over him.</p>
<p>She had sensed the general context, however, weakly nodding her understanding of it, but his sharp inhale at her delicate foot brushing over his thighs was swallowed up, as she said “I'm just going to lower this one, so you can lie down for a while.”</p>
<p>He wanted to do that, wanted to close his eyes and find that he had been dreaming, yet he could feel himself growing hard once more, and he would not be able to pretend that he could ignore this for long. He could already see that the hyposprays had given her too wishful an impression of who he would be to her over the course of their marital confirmation. </p>
<p>He rested as far away from her as his constraint would allow, and he focused on her breathing while she drifted into sleep, but he could not give her more than 30 minutes before he was shivering violently, nipping at the back of her neck to wake her again, pawing at her, crawling over and pressing into her, and they would stay this way for hours.</p>
<p>Their third day was by far the worst for her. She had had to tie his ankles together and hold him down, so that she could take him in her hand when she could not take him in her body any longer. She wrangled him into the shower, on her knees on the tile, and he sunk to the floor with her, soaking and growling and clutching her to him, as he forced her back down onto his lap. She had winced at the slight chafing of it, no longer able to finish with him, and he would not see the tears from her frustration from where he hid his face in the mass of her wet hair while he beat himself into her in so many consecutive ways that he had felt as though she may lose consciousness.</p>
<p>By their fourth and fifth days, he was speaking again, three to four hours between bouts in their bed, or on their couch, or atop their kitchen table, and he was able to regenerate for her the areas where he had bitten her before it scarred over the perfection of her shining skin. She had coerced him to eat when he felt he could not, and his strength seemed to return to him, average and normal, and he truly thought that she may have been correct in her assumption that he had let his fear of an unknown event get the better of him. </p>
<p>By their sixth day, he had ramped back up again, his fever peaking to the point that he thought he could combust, and by the ninth time he had had her in half as many hours, he could feel his cheek burning into her breast as she held him, and he sobbed and gasped against her that he could not do this anymore. That he hurt, and he was hurting her, and to let go of him and leave him alone, but she scratched her nails through his hair in that way at any other time he would have loved, smoothing her hands between his shoulder blades, and pressing her lips to any part of him that was near enough before he flipped her harshly onto her stomach, shoving a pillow under her hips, and working her down into the mattress until faintness took him over. </p>
<p>#</p>
<p>When he opened his eyes again, it was to an extreme thirst. He was stiff, mildly chilled from having adjusted the environmental settings in their quarters lower than they ever had, but he sat up a bit, scanning the darkness of the room for a moment before he found a sealed water he did not remember being placed on his bedside table. He downed it, simply dropping the bottle onto the floor when his arm gave out, and turned to see Nyota, sound asleep with wild hair and puffing eyes, clearly dreaming and lightly snoring the way she always did. </p>
<p>He could only vaguely recall when he had fallen asleep himself, but though he was still rather groggy, he felt more at ease than he had in several days. He tapped his PADD for the star date, his brow twitching at the fact that he had rested for more than triple the amount of time he regularly required, yet he was pleased to find his task boxes checked and cleared, presumably by his assistant who had likely been rather busy. </p>
<p>He thought he might send him a message to convey his gratitude for it, but decided against it in favor of sliding under the blanket next to her as she burrowed further into them, groaning her displeasure at his jostling until his arm draped over the curve of her waist to check her over through the contact for any injuries she may have sustained.</p>
<p>She was able to ask him how he felt before she was deeply sleeping once again, nodding her head when he answered in the affirmative that he was, in fact, well, and no matter that she would not hear him in the volume with which he murmured to her, he whispered his thankfulness for all she had endured, breathing into her hair that he was sorry if he had done anything that did not reflect the way he cared for her, and that he would not be upset if she wished to spend a time away from him after such an oversaturation of his touch, and his company.</p>
<p>They would speak in more depth in the morning, whereupon they would schedule an appointment for a physical exam to return to their full duty roster, but he would not come to understand until nearly three weeks later that it was her ovulation cycle that had finally triggered him, ecstatic and cautiously hopeful when she would tell him with wide eyes that she was ‘late’ for the third time.</p>
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